What is RC Start?

Recurse Center describes RC Start as an experiment that “offers one-on-one advice from members of the Recurse Center community”. If you are selected for RC Start, you’ll get three 45-minute one-on-one sessions with an RC alum(in-person or video chat) and access to the RC Start community through a private forum (check out the link for more specifics).

Why did I apply?

When I came across Recurse Center and RC Start, I had just started to become serious about teaching myself to code. I fell in love with RC’s mission and description of community and I immediately wanted to be apart of it. I had no previous coding background but I was eager to learn and I knew that having a mentor could help answer some of the questions that I’d been stuck on and help point me in the right direction. RC Start seemed like the perfect program from me.

What were the one-on-one sessions like?

As I understand it, every RC Start experience is different based on schedules and other factors so my experience may not look like anyone else’s. Because I’ve been nomadic, I was paired with a remote mentor. When I began the program I was in Italy and my mentor was based in Singapore. Throughout the program, I went from Italy to France to Ireland so we always had a 6 or 7 hour time difference. This was not a problem because I was flexible and she gave me plenty of options to meet. Our sessions were a bit spaced out for scheduling reasons but also to give me time in-between to implement what we talked about and learn on my own. In between each session, my mentor sent me resources and I sent her updates on my progress.

We had 4 sessions total (1 intro and 3 official). Leading up to each session, I made notes about what I wanted to ask and/or work on.

Introductory Session - June 11th, 2016

During this first session we learned a bit about one another, talked about what I have been working on and what I wanted out of our sessions. It was a great start to our journey.

Session 1 - June 26th, 2016

During our first official session she did a code review of my portfolio code, talked about DOM manipulation, and briefly talked about making art with code. She suggested that I look into image processing and other generative art because of my photography background. She also suggested Jekyll for my portfolio and urged me to get it online using gh-pages for practice with git.

Incidentally, I learned how to use ‘ping’ using the terminal because our connection was lost a few times.

Session 2 - July 19, 2016

Leading up to this session I wrote up my learning priorities and a list of specific questions about what I had been working on.

For most of this session we used screen sharing to walk through building a JavaScript carousel and she showed me examples of DOM Manipulation using JavaScript. This was the most helpful session up until this point. Hearing her talk through why she did certain things and about how she thought about the code solidified some of my understanding.

After this session I began building my own small JavaScript projects and finding real-world applications for the scripts that I was learning.

In addition, we talked about:

  • my newly published Jekyll site and issues I had faced
  • open source
  • Git and Github (writing proper commit messages, git commands, etc.)
  • setting up a local server

Session 3 - September 6th, 2016

During our final session, we pair programmed on my local weather app. With my mentor’s help, I changed 2 jQuery scripts to plain JavaScript. In the process she also showed me several debugging techniques.

This time, pairing showed me that I need to work on communicating more clearly (out loud and in real-time) what I am coding and what I don’t understand. This skill is necessary when working in groups.

This was such a valuable experience and I can’t wait to pair more with other people.

Conclusion

The experience was overwhelmingly positive. I really loved my mentor and learned a ton from her.

In retrospect, I would have down a few things differently:

  1. been more active within the RC Start community (in the community forum)
  2. asked more questions in between sessions
  3. paired on all 3 sessions
  4. asked for more code reviews and specific feedback

If you are interested in RC Start or RC Retreat, check them out here.